Waging War: Boehner Comes Out Against Maximizing Minimum Wage to $9

Of many proposals put forth by Barack Obama last night, one of the most specific was the idea of raising the minimum wage to $9. (One of the least specific: “We can get this done.”) This morning, while speaking to reporters, House Speaker John Boehner countered that doing so would “make it harder for small employers to hire people,” which. . . does it actually?

Let’s see: The Washington Postreports that the “left-leaning Center for American Progress recently surveyed a raft of academic studies on the impact of the minimum wage and found that they showed that minimum wage hikes boost workers’ wages but don’t materially hike unemployment—even amid bad economic times.” It’s a fairly heated debate, though, with lots of research supporting the correlation between increased minimum-wage and increased unemployment and lots of research demonstrating a lack of this exact relationship. However, Quartz citesThe Economist in noting that “the gap between academic economists who believe higher minimum wages have detrimental effects and those who don’t is narrowing. Supposedly, more of them are coming around to the idea that if higher minimum wages are shown to reduce employment in some U.S. states, it’s because of differences between the states, and not because of the minimum wage itself.”

For what it’s worth, Boehner seemed to touch upon exactly none of this in his justification for opposing Obama’s proposal. Instead, he shared a metaphor about a ladder, its detachable rungs, and Americans who may want to use the rungs in their attempted ascent of the ladder, which is itself a metaphor (meta-metaphor?) for the American dream. “What happens when you take the rungs away on the economic ladder, you make it harder for people to get on the ladder. Our goal is to get people on the ladder and help them climb that ladder so they can live the American dream.” It would seem to this untrained, non-ladder-engineer that “receiving more money in one’s paycheck” might also qualify as a “rung” but we are not a meta-metaphor engineer, either.